as the great stronghold of constitutional principles, and believing that to her encouragement was due the revolutionary outbreak of 1848. The immunity of England herself from disorder did not open their eyes to see that it was their own misgovernment which had produced revolution. It only rendered them the more furious, as they believed that England had preached insurrection, while other Governments bore its penalties. It was touch-and-go in the first year of Napoleon III.’s reign whether he would try to put himself at the head of a European combination against us, or whether he would become our ally and fight one of the other Powers. He certainly believed that war was necessary in order to divert the attention of France from domestic politics, to conciliate the army, and thus on both sides to consolidate his own position. The almost universal feeling in England was that he was going to fight us. The common opinion was that the new Emperor’s first thought would be to avenge Waterloo. By 1853, however, Louis Napoleon had decided not to fight us, but to fight with us against Russia. This was due more to Palmerston than to any other Englishman. Greville reports a conversation early in 1853 between himself and Comte de Flahault (afterwards French ambassador in London), who had just returned from Paris, where he had been in constant communication with the Emperor. Flahault said that the rancor and insolence against England on the part of Austria, Russia, and Prussia, were almost inconceivable; he added that Louis Napoleon had offered to him in the first year of his reign a position which it had been the object of his uncle’s life to attain,--the leadership of a European league against us; that he decided to decline these flattering overtures, and to consolidate his alliance with England. Flahault went on to say that he had supported Louis Napoleon in this determination, and had represented to him that the Northern Powers had long withheld any recognition of his Imperial position; whereas England had at once recognized him, and that if she had not done so, probably the acknowledgment of the other Powers would have been still further delayed. Flahault represented to Greville that, greatly to his surprise, the Emperor had wholly concurred in this view. It is needless to say that the importance of this conversation is not derived from its truth, but from its representing what Louis Napoleon wished to be believed in England in the spring of 1853. He was strongly desirous for his own purposes of the English alliance, and knew that it was the only one he could hope for at that time in Europe. So far from declining flattering proposals from the Czar, his vanity had just been bitterly wounded by the absolute refusal of the Russian monarch to greet him as “_mon frère_.”